“When you’re young, no one cares who your parents are, although Mum would arrive to pick me up in her full hair and makeup and fur, and I used to say, ‘Can’t you just dress normally, like all the other mums?’ ” Georgia May Jagger once recalled. Oh, have we not all been there, even if our own mothers weren’t exactly Jerry Hall?

But here is another question—what was that Texas-born supermodel wearing under her bright funny fur? Had she perhaps thrown the thing over her nightclothes and hightailed it to Georgia’s school? If so, she was in good cinematic company—the iconic Liz Taylor sported a mink over her slip in BUtterfield 8, for which she won an Oscar; Bette Davis claimed she would happily get married in a fur coat over a nightgown in All About Eve; and even Carrie Bradshaw tossed her pelts over her pajamas on New Year’s Eve and went down to Miranda’s apartment in the Sex and the City movie.

But I digress! Aren’t we all gangster kittens sometimes, or don’t we at least want to be? So what will you, and other renegade feline types, plop under your own cheerful, nonserious furs this winter? (Please don’t just say you plan to wear your jeans every single day—even if they are Vetements) Why not opt for, oh, I don’t know, gold-sequined shorts? Stripy silky trousers? Or maybe just the most scrumptious pj tops on earth?

How do couture-like silhouettes manifest into something essentially urban and city-ready? Ask Sacai’s Chitose Abe who this season looked to haute couture – volume, panniers and Fortuny pleats included – to stir her no-holds-barred imagination.

This collection proved that there is no end to her ambition; it takes gumption to reimagine those exaggerated volumes and ideas and rework them in heavy – often masculine – fabrics, all the while executing something elegant. An M65 parka was puffed up at the back, pannier hips and tulle padding shaped sweaters and skirts, while herringbone tweeds were elasticised to form womanly hourglass silhouettes. It was about something precious and rarefied applied to the familiar and everyday.

Her series of sweater dresses – if you can call them that, the workday term seems almost insulting – were exceptional. They comprised chunky Aran knits which were peeled away at the shoulder line to reveal crisp white shirting underneath, while flippy skirts kicked out in panels of knit and cotton.
As complicated as that all sounds, the cleverest – and most crucial – fact about these hybrids is that they’re very often the simplest of pieces to wear. Take the show-goers for example, so many of whom were touting the hits of previous seasons, from the leather-perfecto biker jackets to military and guipure lace coats, khaki bombers, floral maxi dresses, even, a sighting of a broderie anglaise full skirt.

She’s an expensive creature the Altuzarra woman. Just look at her in that rich tobacco suede shirtdress. Evenwhen she adopts a touch of seersucker pastel gingham, it’s done so in a lean pencil skirt suit and comes over as more pristine than picnic, because well, everything is this woman’s wardrobe is pristine: from the series of lattice leather vests and pencil skirts (meticulously bonded and grommeted together by hand and worn with nothing underneath but a monied suntan) to those silky shirt dresses with slits up to there (few could execute such slashes without proceedingsturning unsavoury).

Altuzarra is expert at dressing his woman. Those shirt dresses are a favourite of his, so too those wrap-around skirts with ribbon streams and ties, and disrupted blanket stripes on slubbed linen car coats. “Rosemary’s Baby and Barry Lyndon were the starting points for this collection,” reveals the designer. “I became interested in the idea of a sinister and undone prettiness and romance, ill-fated and doomed.”

Certainly there was a romance to his series of wafting eveningwear; wisp-thin and sail-like in volume in a manipulated ikat print, and elsewhere, slithers of black silk slip dresses were trimmed in tiny dangling seed pearls; Altuzarra said he wanted to evoke ideas in 17th century jewellery and adornment.

CHRISTOPHER BAILEY loves to riff on a topper. In previous seasons he’s reimagined the biker, the aviation jacket, the gritty parka, the trench – of course – and this season, he turned his hand to the indigo denim jacket, that forever young wardrobe staple that’s imbued with good times and optimism.

Serenaded with a live performance by James Bay, Malaika Firth opened the show (fellow Burberry girls, Kate Moss and Cara Delevingne sat front row, alongside Mario Testino) in a fitted wasp-waisted jean jacket with white sheepskin erupting out from under its little peplum.

Varying versions were in never-ending supply. Some were lined in sprouting white ostrich feathers, others were fiercely cropped, another was clad in dusty pink mink, or rendered in grass green suede with a glossy plastic collar and breast pockets. You’ll be spoilt for choice. It wasn’t only those jackets that conveyed a young-at-heart appeal, every luxury house seemingly has a hit sneaker right now and Christopher Bailey debuted Burberry’s all-white style, the “field” sneaker with a bright striped foamy sole.

Under those jackets were tulle dresses as light as candy floss that were whipped around bodies in sensual swathes of bandaged twists or pleats.

The British countryside comes alive in spring and there were nods to that feeling, which arrive with the first signs of summer, rooted in this collection. From those fluffy soft lambswool accents, to that particular shade of grass green, to the oversized butterfly prints and enlarged and abstracted bumble bee motifs and slogans that screamed “insects,” “flower,” and “sun” plastered over trench coats and printed dresses, and yes, all further enhanced by Bay’s The Clocks Go Forward, and the sunlight streaming through the Burberry tent in Hyde Park – as though right on cue.